Although many may think that a child learns to read in kindergarten or first grade, research indicates that learning to read and write can start at home, long before children go to school. Children can start down the road to becoming readers from the day they are born. Very early, children begin to learn about spoken language when they hear family…

For the first time in the 30-year history of the Society for Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science, the organization is focusing on the nurturing of scientific talent in preschoolers and very young children. SACNAS, whose mission is to encourage Chicano/Latino and American Indian students to pursue graduate education and advanced…

This paper considers the case of the Michigan Migrant Head Start program to describe and analyze the labor market conditions and teaching staff characteristics to identify the challenges faced by Migrant Head Start grantees in attracting, hiring, retaining, and training degreed teachers. The emphasis is on describing and analyzing the child care…

Although it is generally accepted that the proportion of children diagnosed with pervasive developmental disorders (PDDs) has increased in the past two decades, there is no consensus on the prevalence of these conditions. The accompanying large rise in demand for services, together with uncertainty regarding the extent to which the observed…

Purpose: To evaluate the effectiveness of a screening instrument (the Swedish Communication Screening at 18 months of age; SCS18), derived from the Swedish MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory, in identification of 18-month-old children who will be severely language disabled by 3 years of age, the authors (a) analyzed which SCS18's…

The Head Start Family and Child Experiences Survey (FACES) collects data on a nationally representative sample of Head Start programs, classrooms, teachers, parents, and children examining the quality and effects of Head Start. Three waves of data collection have occurred: in 1997, 2000, and 2003. Information presented in this publication is…

The kindergarten year is quite unlike preschool and not like first grade, either. What should teaching practice look like for this critical year? This book offers a vivid picture of kindergarten children, perceptive discussion of the current kindergarten context and policy issues, and clear guidelines for teaching and assessing kindergartners.…

In 2006, states will add almost one billion additional education tax dollars to their budgets as politicians in more than twenty states consider moving toward a Universal Prekindergarten (UPK) system. Although a spirited debate has taken place over the advantages to children of a pre-K education, there has been little or no debate on how, rather…

"Child Care Health Connections" is a bimonthly newsletter published by the California Childcare Health Program (CCHP), a community-based program of the University of California, San Francisco School of Nursing, Department of Family Health Care Nursing. The goals of the newsletter are to promote and support a healthy and safe environment…

Scallywags is a community-based, early intervention programme for young children (aged 3-7) with behavioural, emotional and social problems, which integrates work in the home and school with a parenting curriculum and direct work with children. A pre-post intervention study across multi-sites of 340 participants is reported. Using standardised…

Social epistemology is a broad set of approaches to the study of knowledge and to gain information about the social dimensions. This intellectual movement of wide cross-disciplinary sources reconstructs the problems of epistemology when knowledge is considered to be intrinsically social. In the first chapter, "Social Epistemology and Social…

The Head Start Family and Child Experiences Survey (FACES), sponsored by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families (ACF), was first launched in 1997 as a periodic longitudinal study of program performance. This report is the fourth in a series that uses data from the FACES 2006 cohort to describe…

This book is an essential reference on research in early childhood education not only in the United States but throughout the world. It provides a comprehensive overview of important contemporary issues and the information necessary to make judgments about these issues. The field has changed significantly since the publication of the first edition…

We study the benefits of junior kindergarten for linguistic-minority 4-year-olds compared to their linguistic-majority classmates from the same low-income neighborhoods. At the end of the school year, linguistic-minority children made significantly greater improvements in language skills than their host society classmates. At the mid-year point,…

PACT: Helping Children with Special Needs, an affiliate of the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, operates a therapeutic nursery that serves families who have at least one child from birth to 3 years of age, and who are living in a Baltimore City homeless shelter. In partnership with the Martin Luther King Early Head Start Program…